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A Guardian headline today shouts: “Trump Has Taken Us To The Brink Of Nuclear War. Can He Be Stopped?”. And I’m thinking that is such obvious nonsense, how dare you print it? The North Korea nuke build up has been going on for decades, and neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush nor Obama ever took any decisive actions against it. And now it all falls into Trump’s lap. But that doesn’t mean he’s ‘taken us’ anywhere at all. The last thing Trump wants is this.

It’s not the last thing people like John McCain want, however. Who said about Trump’s “fire and fury” threat to Kim Jong-un that you shouldn’t make that threat unless you’re willing to execute it. Yeah, that’s exactly what McCain and Lindsey Graham and their entire entourage of friends and servants on Capitol Hill have been looking for for ages: war. And they see this in the same way that their peers saw Grenada in the Reagan era.

Small country, no challenge, good publicity. But Kim, crazy as he may or may not be, has learned a few lessons on the way. Cheney, W. and Rumsfeld ‘regime-changed’ Saddam Hussein, and Obama/Hillary ‘came saw and he died’ Gaddafi. They got offed before they could develop nukes. Kim knows that’s the dividing line. Sure, as I said, he may be crazy, but then everybody in this movie is.

That “Trump Has Taken Us To The Brink Of Nuclear War” line is based on da Donald’s “fire and fury” comment. But that is just him trying to talk to Kim in his own language. It was my first thought as soon as I heard it. Every other approach has failed, try this. My second thought was it was directed as much against Beijing as it was against Kim: Xi Jinping, once again, you have to stop this.

Xi has taken notice. He has a crucial Communist Party convention looming this fall, and he can’t afford to have a war in his backyard. He just didn’t have a reason to prevent it before. A few hours after Trump’s “fire and fury”, North Korea released a Canadian prisoner sentenced to hard labor for life. Coincidence? That’s not likely.

What Trump, what America, would need right now is open conversation with Putin, who can make or break things in the area. But given the recent sanctions etc., he doesn’t have much incentive. And the White House has few channels left to communicate with the Kremlin, because every single phone line is under investigation from one grand jury or another, and no line can be trusted to be secret anymore.

That hampers Trump and his people, but it even more hampers Putin in expressing his opinions. At the very moment, when there are nuclear threats being openly, publicly, bandied around, and the US Congress has tied its president’s hands in a very questionable fashion, which makes it impossible for him to talk to the one nuclear power in the world that matters.

The strange, and worrisome, thing about the ‘Orwellian’ 99% vote to take Trump’s powers away from him when it comes to communicating with Putin is that Capitol Hill decided to take it away, only to endorse itself with it. While you can discuss into the wee hours and then some what a US president’s powers should be, and what not, for any political ‘entity’ to vote another’s entity only to have it fall upon itself is legally dangerous.

And that’s not just because John McCain has seemed hellbent on ending his life with a big bang, forever. It’s even more because Capitol Hill has proven that it can effectively strangulate any president it doesn’t like, even if the American people have voted him/her in.

The very ironic consequence, at some point we wish will never come, would be that if Da Donald wants to strike Kim with anything at all, he’ll have to ask McCain and Graham for permission. And they will say: of course: when can we do it, can we do a little bit more just to be sure?

But if Trump wants to prevent that war, be it conventional or nuclear, who does he have to turn to? Not McCain and Graham, McDonnell, that set. They’re lost in the pockets of the military-industrial complex. As are Hillary and Obama and whatever is left after the Democrats go through a court-induced DNC fall-cleaning. They are paid by the exact same sources.

So who? The generals he’s surrounded himself with in the West Wing? Come to think of it, they may be the only sane voices left in Washington. But at the same time, does that feel like a real confidence booster?

Look, America, there are a 100,000 things wrong with Trump. But he is your president. And even if the whole Robert Mueller dig ever gets anywhere, it may first of all be too late, second of all lead to absolute mayhem if any impeachment process gets anywhere, and third of all have you end up with something far worse, president Pence, president Hillary, whatever.

What little-big-boy Kim should be telling you is that it’s time to support your president, no matter how flawed and despicable you think he may be. Because, and this is not the first time I’ve said this, he may well be the only thing standing between you and war. And don’t listen to the voices who claim he’s eager to start it. Or at least don’t listen only to them.

There’s a real chance that Trump will start a war somewhere, but it won’t be because he wants one. Other people in Washington do though. Just about all of them, given that 99% vote on Russia sanctions.

It is time to support your president, America. Not because you like him, or because you agree with him. But because your country elected him and because if you don’t, god help you.

I generally love your work Raul, and we met in NZ a few years ago at a Permaculture Conference buying chips, but I have to say I don’t follow your logic here. I don’t see how ‘supporting’ President Trump would make war with North Korea any less likely. Yes, there are dangerously competent homicidal maniacs sneaking up behind him, but I am not sure his brand of complete incompetence is a useful defense against them. I would also question supporting a morally bereft leader because times are dangerous as a strategy in general – that’s a pretty good summary of fascism and failed states around the globe and through history. I would think it’s also exactly the game Trump is playing – look how dangerous the world is, I alone can make it safe for you. It’s the oldest bad politician trick in the book. As an aside if there is nobody in the Trump organisation with the ability to set up an encrypted line to Putin, then they are truly out of their depth. Unless of course they can’t trust the person on the other end of the line to keep it secure.

I strongly disagree Ilargi; I do not support Trump or the U.S. government, and its insane hegemonic behavior and imperialist attitude towards the world’s countries.
The U.S. has assigned, unto itself, the ruler of planet earth.
I cannot and do not support that under any circumstance.

None of that makes me a Trump fan or anything remotely like it. He should not be president. But he is. And looking at the other options, I understand why he is. His role is to show us what an amoral cesspit Washington has become.

>• There are no good choices in Washington.
Correct, unfortunately.
>• Trump is the elected US president.
Only because of the electoral college; he lost the popular vote by 6 million.
>* Trump doesn’t want to start a war (he’s afraid of it).
I honestly don’t know if he’ll have a choice; I think it’s obvious he’s being manipulated by *others*.

>* His role is to show us what an amoral cesspit Washington has become.
Ain’t that the truth…

This is a pretty good assessment of the Trump presidency and the U.S., by Andrew Bacevich;http://www.alternet.org/world/trump-presidency-very-definition-madness
He also says to get rid of the electoral college; unfortunately, that would have gotten us Hillary in that election.
No good choices to be had.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations emeritus at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies.

Hi Ilargi –
That is a very provocative imperative – all the more surprising since it comes from you. Could you explain in a concrete way what citizens should be doing to show their support? I voted Green Party last November in a state where it didn’t really matter. (Had it mattered I don’t know what I would have/should have done.) But even I am surprised at a) how truly loathsome is “our” president and b) the determination of congress to provoke a conflict with Russia and China.
Seems to me that the entire political class is hopelessly dependent upon selling war and drugs and stealing money from the people to do it. I have no idea what to do except to stay local and as out of the way as possible. Do you have another specific suggestion or plan for action? My friends nearly disowned me for refusing to vote for Hilary. Support Trump? He sure looks as though he wants war. How do you know what he wants? Maybe his blustering is a way to scare the opposition? Trouble is that his Korean counterpart seems as nutty as he is. Perhaps the only successful one is Bannon who is getting the chaos he wants.

rheba
Given what happened to Iraq’s Saddam (gave up WMD’s), Libya’s Ghaddafi (gave up WMD’s); North Korea’s Kim seems pretty sane and rational to me.
The U.S. propaganda machine is full tilt boogy, going after Kim Jong Un and he knows full well what that means.
Good luck; I got out right after March 19, 2003.
May I suggest you read 1984? Orwell pretty much nailed it.

If you remove the electoral college, you can pretty much guarantee a civil war, with the secession of flyoverland. Everyone is still playing together because they have the sense (illusion?) they are represented. “Only won by electoral” is a bit off-color. Those were the rules since 1789 and everyone campaigns accordingly. List of Presidents who lost the popular vote:

That’s not going into arcana like the 1992 election where Clinton won, but with less than half the vote (split by two candidates), or how so few people vote there hasn’t been a plurality in decades. Are we going to say Quincy shouldn’t be President? Maybe we should give Florida back? Really, all this loose talk without legal and historical context can be damaging — like when I hear now everything is treason or sedition: it’s not. Those words have very specific legal meanings we might educate ourselves about and why each exists. Not everyone who disagrees is therefore Hitler or Mao. Words have meanings. Actual history exists.

Since we already burned all the furniture, no one cares about truth or knows history, everyone who has any inside experience is ipso facto corrupt, and most everything said in the last 50 years is a lie of some sort, it was always going to be bad. We just have to work a plan to make the practical best of a bad show without getting zealous or dogmatic about it. I think that’s what Raul is saying.

If supporting a president is provocative, that’s quite something. “He looks like he wants war” may have something to do with the impression the media have been giving of him through time. Obama didn’t look it, I guess, and to his credit he held off some ‘creative’ ideas from warmongers, but he did set out to murder Gaddafi, and is largely responsible for the mess in ME/NA.

Trump might not shy away from a Grenada style ‘war’, but he has nothing to gain from a conflict so close to nukes. That can only go wrong, and he would get all the blame while McCain etc. get the ‘game’ they want.

American politics is in a very deep crisis, much deeper than most people seem to realize, and other than Trump there’s no-one in sight who can do anything about it. Trump lay bare that crisis, by having everyone turn against him. It shows us how tight the powers that be, are. McCain, Hillary, CNN, NYT, it’s all the exact same thing.

Hello all – yes have read 1984 and following AE since its inception and prior to that the Oil Drum. I am just surprised to see this post about supporting Trump here on this site after all these years. I think we all know that waste-based industrial capitalism is dying and we all hope that it, and the American Empire, will die with more of a whimper than a bang. Nicole predicted that Obama would go down as the most hated president in history. I am thinking it will be Trump. I don’t hate anybody. Anger and hatred are not helpful. I am sorry for the family of Donald Trump and for all families over all the world.

Could all this talk about N.Korea, nukes, fire&fury just be a distraction? Don’t we all know that the world is a huge financial & economic bubble looking for a pin somewhere to burst it? Maybe the pin to burst the bubble will be war or maybe something else. But we need to stay focused on the bankers stealing our money and preparing our loved ones for the eventual difficult times ahead.

Excellent and coherent post, Ilargi. Trump MAY be the only barricade we have to becoming another Greece that is slowly and helplessly suffocated by the Zioglobalists. Hillary or one of the establishment Republican candidates would have been the kiss of death.

There’s no doubt finance could play a role in this. the VIX volatility index was up 50%(?!) yesterday, though from lows so low they are essentially meaningless. What’s saying more is the tendency to move money out of emerging markets (wait till everyone reads their weekend papers). And gold of course is strong. So yes, as a way to move out of risk and back to America, it would seem to fit a pattern.

But I’m just theorizing there, thinking out loud. One thing I think is certain is that the volatility index won’t come back down anytime soon. And that WILL have a large effect on economies, on loans, on everything. I don’t think anyone -other than John McCain and his ilk- really want to throw a nuke bomb, but the prospect of it happening is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Ilargi, do you not know that the two parties are a political false dichotomy financed by a monolithic Debt-Money Monopolist Mega-Corporate Fascist Empire?
I won’t be supporting the latest Debt-Money Monopolist Presidential quisling, nor will by a supporting the “human power elite” traitors that surround him…
President Trump works for the Banksters that rigged the system to implode in a fiery spoked pit of debt-money bubble busting deflation… and you want people to follow him?

“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy” (Georgetown University Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966.)

>>Excellent and coherent post, Ilargi. Trump MAY be the only barricade we have to becoming another Greece that is slowly and helplessly suffocated by the Zioglobalists. Hillary or one of the establishment Republican candidates would have been the kiss of death.<<
Trump works for the Debt-Money Monopolists and their “human power elite” (reference to the movie They Live) and he’s their Chosen One to usher in the collapse and force the national bankruptcy down our throats.
Watch in wonder… but it makes absolutely perfect sense to those not still controlled by the Debt-Money Matrix programming.

>>The U.S. propaganda machine is full tilt boogy, going after Kim Jong Un and he knows full well what that means.<<

The “U.S.,” whatever you imagine that to be, doesn’t control the propaganda machine, the private cartel of Debt-Money Monopolists control the propaganda machine. They also gave Trump $2 billion in free advertising, and they also financed the Justice Department to “October Surprise” Hillary with a legitimate criminal investigation that they outlined in detailed – AND THEN FAILED TO PROSECUTE FOR THE EVIDENCE SUPPORTED CRIME. Why announce an investigation when you have no intent to prosecute even if they are caught red handed and guilty? The only answer was to promote Bankster candidate Donald J. Trump. Remember how much he crooned about the great banks, despite their criminality, in his first debate with Hillary? I do.

The Bankster methodologies aren’t even that sophisticated. They pretended to despise the Federal Reserve Act, too. Gullible suckers fell for that misdirection, too.